The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance urges the people of Cleveland to stay strong as it brings you this week's blog post roundup.

Off the Kuff notes that even white people don't much like Donald Trump.

SocraticGadfly, using a simple tool on an NPR webpage, shows that Hillary Clinton doesn't need Green votes, unless to riff on band Rush, she's today's Tom Dewey.

Egberto Willies cogently observes that supporting police officers and Black Lives Matter activists are not mutually exclusive.

Asian American Action Fund picks a roster of 2017 fantasy Clinton cabinet members.

CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme does not celebrate Texas' miserable child well being ranking. Republicans don't like children.

A prediction PDiddie at Brains and Eggs made about the outcome of the SD-13 special election to replace Rodney Ellis was dead on.

The Lewisville Texan Journal reports that Army Corps of Engineers has chosen not to issue an environmental impact statement regarding the improvements being studied to the Lewisville Dam.

John Coby at Bay Area Houston laments the 19% of Latinos who have boarded the Trump Train.

Following the developments in the prosecution of Chris "Frack Master" Faulkner, Txsharon at Bluedaze posted the FBI's seizure of his Bentley and Aston Martin.

Neil at All People Have Value spoke to a longtime friend on the phone over the past week. Neil says longtime relationships add a great deal of meaning to life. APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

The Houston Press sees Dan Patrick as the stand-in for Greg Abbott at "Trumpfest", the GOP convention opening this week.

Equality Texas advances the FairnessUSA spot that will air during the last night of the RNC depicting transgender discrimination, and has an extended version of it posted. 

Grits for Breakfast examines the reasons why more Texans are being shot by police, and also dissects that Harvard study purporting to show racial bias does not exist in police shootings.

Zachery Taylor sees the media perpetuating the divisions between law enforcement officers and Black Lives Matters.

Jay Blazek Crossley notes that in 2016, transportation decision-making bodies in the state of Texas continue to be overwhelmingly dominated by older white men.

Paul Woodruff ponders the ethical implications of using a robot to kill the Dallas sniper.

Juanita Jean wades into the Donald Trump-RBG war of words.

Kyle Shelton delves into the history of taking protest to the streets.

Somervell County Salon observed that the number of Glen Rose ISD student vaccination exemptions has nearly doubled over last year.

Kiko Martinez looks at Elena of Avalor, the first Latina princess from the Disney machine.

Lone Star Ma recommends a few books for people who would like to be less ignorant on racial matters.

Doyen Oyeniyi reminds the lieutenant governor that his words matter, too.

And Pages of Victory helped out a neighbor while she was on vacation.

Sunday Funnies

Hair Furor faceplants ahead of RNC

Brutal unforced errors going into Cleveland.

(Thursday night) there was chatter - half tongue-in-cheek but not totally - about whether Trump's decision to postpone his vice presidential announcement wasn't simply some gambit to gain advantage from the massacre in Nice but an effort to play for time and possibly back out of his apparent decision to place Mike Pence on the ticket. That couldn't possibly be true. Not really. But it's Trump. So who knows? Now of course we find out early this afternoon that it was true. [...]

(By Friday afternoon) there were already multiple reports from credible journalists that Trump was up late into Thursday night trying to find a way or find out if there was any way he could back out of his offer to put Pence on the ticket. Now, late in the evening there's this even more detailed version of events in the Times. Trump was some mix of miffed at the leaks, unimpressed by Pence, unable to let the other guys down easy and looking for some way out of the Pence box. He just couldn't find it. On its own terms, this turn of events perfectly captures the mix of unsteadiness, cynicism and derp that characterizes everything about the Trump campaign. But the bigger story isn't so much that it happened as that it was leaked, so quickly, and at such a devastating moment for Pence and the ticket. 

Quite unpresidential.  Somewhat worse than this ...

The last-minute plea for $6 million from Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson to rescue the Republican convention has erupted in controversy, as four of the five signatories to the letter from party organizers never saw it before it was sent and major donors flagged serious errors that forced the convention hosts to apologize to one of the GOP’s most influential financiers.

The episode has opened a window into a host committee that is scrambling and still millions shy of its fundraising target, only days before tens of thousands of Republicans arrive in Cleveland, as it acknowledges for the first time that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has put a damper on donations.

The letter, obtained by POLITICO on Thursday, outlined two dozen major corporations — Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Duke Energy and Apple, among them — that it claimed had backed out a combined more than $8.1 million in pledged donations in recent months.

But on Friday, Emily Lauer, a spokeswoman for the Cleveland 2016 host committee, acknowledged to POLITICO that the list of lost donors in the letter to Adelson was inaccurate — and that the committee has now reached out to Adelson’s aides to apologize.

I just don't understand why people think Trump is going to pull off an Electoral College upset ... unless they know Hillary Clinton better than me, and believe she is capable of screwing herself worse than this.  Which is certainly possible but increasingly unlikely.